Fujitsu Amilo D8830

It was time to buy a new computer, preferably laptop. Maybe it wasn't the best choice, but this is what i got. Problems were expected - and they came.

It was a rocky start: At first graphics card was probably broken, resulting in erros in screen. It was sent to warranty service. The first time it came back the problem appeared soon again. After two months of hassle they gave me a totally new one. After about half a year after that, my battery went empty. I sent email to a support address and got the following response (translated):

Batteries are ..., the more you use them the faster they
degrade. Already in half a year the capacity of the battery can be significantly reduced, not to mention what happens during one year, which is the
warranty time of the battery.
In addition, it seems that the computer has Linux installed. I would like to point out that we only support
Windows XP. This may cause additional deviations, depending on how well Linux supports Amilos power management features.

Luckily the phone support suggested me to send the battery to warranty service. After two weeks i got a new one, which works fine (mWh should be mAh):

Status 2005-02-23

Not much have changed in the software. The single biggest thing was change from XFree to XOrg. I didn't need 3D acceleration that time. It was a bit hard to get it working with XOrg at first. The problem I was tackling with is now listed in Gentoo Ati Radeon FAQ and was only a configuration error. I also went to the extent to add "video=vesafb:ywrap,vga=0xF01,nomtrr" to my grub config to make some mtrr erros go away. The new drivers with XOrg are more stable than the ones I used with XFree. Looks like the garbage effect in UT2004d has changed its form to only slow down the game significantly.

The battery went completely dead a couple of days ago. Already for some months the battery didn't give the amount of power usage or charging speed. Anyway, I moved the laptop to a class room and the battery had something like 2100 mWh to begin with. I didn't plug electric cord because I wanted to see how long the battery really lasts. It run about three minutes and then it run out of power without any warning. After a reboot the battery showed 0 mWh and didn't charge anymore. I'm going to send the battery to same place as last time as soon as I find the necessary papers, which may take two weeks.

I'm getting little bit irritated with all the hardware not working properly or broken in short period of time. Few days before the battery the USB interface card in my external hard drive broke. Looks like I have to backup 75 GiB of data and send the hard drive to warranty. Luckily I didn't yet use the full capacity of the disk ( 250 GB ) :).

Back to the laptop. Still one problem which has been bothering me. I tried to make independent backup of the whole system to the external hard drive I mentioned above. But it looks like the BIOS wont boot from the external drive if the laptop's hard drive is not disabled, which is makes even testing quite annoying. I got the idea to try to make backup system on another drive because the laptop's hard drive has ocassionally stopped working. I mean, it makes unpleasant noices and I can see timeouts in the system log. To date, however, I have been able to fix it with reboot or with brisk hit from fist over it.

And yet another thing i would like to mention, the second button in the line of three buttons in the upper right corner (info, mail, power) prevents the cd-activity led from being on if pressed down. Nothing serious, but an odd bug.

Installation was quite painless - for me - as my friend did it. Almost everything worked out of the box except 3d-acceleration and my wireless card, but that wasn't fault of the laptop. One day when i realised i really had chance of gettind 3d-acceleration to work, i took mission to get it to work. After 12 hours, numerous kernel rebuilds, running out of space in root partition, corrupted boot partition and too many lock-ups, at half five in the morning it finally worked, thanks to great Gentoo Ati Radeon FAQ.